Hacked materials from the powerful rightwing thinktank the Heritage Foundation show that applicants to a Project 2025-branded effort to create a talent pool for the Trump administration cited the influence of Nazi political theorists and other far-right thinkers on their political views.
Not all applicants revealed in the hack ended up with Trump administration jobs, but some current appointees did make applications.
And amid a developing “civil war” on the right about the influence of the antisemitic far right – which has included internal dissension at Heritage – the materials show that at least seven members of a nationwide network of men-only, nativist and antisemitic clubs applied to work in the administration, revealing the extent to which the Republicans and the far-right have converged.
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The database and the hack
Project 2025 was a policy project by Heritage designed to influence and power the agenda of the second Trump administration along radical conservative lines.
One of the “pillars” of Project 2025 as it developed throughout 2023 and 2024 was to create a pool of politically-aligned candidates for staffing the new administration, according to media reports in 2024.
At that time, Project 2025 director Paul Dans said that the database was “akin to a conservative LinkedIn”, full of potential recruits likely to “be a good fit for a Republican administration”. Dans aimed to assemble some 20,000 potential recruits.
One way in which the database was grown was Heritage’s invitation for applications to the Presidential Administration Academy. The academy, and the open application process, were widely publicized in conservative media in early 2024.
Videos from that academy’s training curriculum leaked in August 2024, significantly raising public awareness of Project 2025.
The materials analyzed by the Guardian are applications for the Presidential Administration Academy. It contains 13,726 applications, a small minority of which are clearly intended to lampoon Heritage and the Trump movement.
Applicants were asked to characterize their political beliefs according to a drop-down menu, spell out their political philosophy, identify the primary influence on their politics, to name a book and a public figure who had influenced them, and then to say whether they agreed with political proposals such as whether the US should increase legal immigration.
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Carl Schmitt
Dozens of applicants expressed admiration for Carl Schmitt, a German political theorist who has been called the “crown jurist of the Third Reich” and whose intellectual legacy is inseparable from his collaboration with the Nazi regime.
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Applicants who cite Schmitt include Paul Ingrassia, who was last week tapped for a new job as deputy general counsel of the General Services Administration, leaving his former role as White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security.
Last month, Ingrassia’s nomination for special counsel to the United States foundered after group chats leaked in which he told other participants that he had “a Nazi streak” and that holidays commemorating Black people should be “eviscerated”.
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Fringe figures
Several applicants nominated Jared Taylor as an influence on their thought. Taylor is a prominent white nationalist, and the founder of the American Renaissance website, journal, and annual conference. For decades, Taylor has denied that he is a white supremacist.
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Elsewhere in the application, they said “I gravitate towards antebellum writers more than modern ones”, and said that the Fourteenth Amendment, passed in the wake of the civil war and granting citizenship to formerly enslaved people, should be repealed, since “Nearly all of our modern problems are descended from this verbose and destructive inversion of sovereignty signed under duress.”
The Old Glory Club
There were at least seven applicants who the Guardian identified as members of the far-right, men-only secret society, the Old Glory Club, although none of them appear to have been offered jobs in the administration so far.
Although none appear to have gone on to find employment in the Trump regime, they made little attempt to hide their nativist views.
Last July, the Guardian reported that the Old Glory Club had established at least 26 clubs nationwide, had ties with similar far-right groups in the UK and antisemitic activists, had held in-person meetups, and represented a “new breed of extremist organisation which aims first to build an offline social network before taking over society”.
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The post Leaked Files Show Far-Right Influences Among Project 2025 Applicants appeared first on American Renaissance.
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